The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [97]
“I would like you to meet my colleagues, Lydia and Bruno,” Norm said to the loose assembly, and released Lydia’s arm. Lydia shook everyone’s hand in turn, and she let go of my hand so that I could shake their hands. Each one of them, one by one, respectfully half-kneeled to the floor so that their faces were closer to mine, told me their names (not one of which stuck in either my short-term or my long-term memory), and softly squeezed my hand for a moment in theirs. The people could not bring themselves to attempt to converse with me. These people were all smiles—friendly enough. I quickly took Lydia’s hand again.
The room socially relaxed again. The volume and the comfort level of people’s conversations were slowly on the rise. I began to feel slightly agitated.
I watched the people in the gallery moving from one painting to the next with their glasses of wine in their hands, pointing at my paintings and commenting on them. They seemed to be particularly impressed by my representational renderings, as people who know little about art typically are.
One of the people who was standing around with me and Lydia and Norm, one of the people to whom I had just been introduced, seemed to be a particularly important person. An important man. He wore nice clothes. He was an older man and handsome, with sleek shocks of graying hair erupting from his head, a gaunt and serious face and frameless glasses that delicately pincered the bridge of his pointy nose and magnified his watery gray eyes. I noticed that most of the people around us were wearing name tags—these white rectangles with names scrawled on them in black marker, stuck to their outer garments, near their hearts—but not this man. This man wore no name tag. Apparently he either did not wish his name to be known, or else he assumed everyone already knew it. Norm and Lydia were both rapt in conversation with this man. The Important Man was doing most of the talking, and Norm and Lydia were doing most of the polite listening, their heads bobbing like buoys on their necks with nodding and inserting yeses and mm-hmms in the troughs of his wave of speech. Occasionally Norm, when given the green light, would launch into a torrent of words, speaking rapidly, as if he were afraid of losing the Important Man’s interest before he had arrived at his point. Lydia said something here and there, but mostly she was silent. Their conversation was over my head. Lydia clasped my hand tightly, now and then giving it a squeeze to remind me of her presence, of her closeness. I wanted to go home.
I noticed there were two men standing near the doors of the gallery. They were young and healthy, with short hair and thick arms, dressed in uniforms: black shoes, blue pants, crisp tan short-sleeved shirts with flashing metal buttons. They wore badges. They looked like they were not here for fun but rather were only doing their jobs. They very slowly perambulated the room, not talking to anyone, surveying the crowd, paying close attention. What were they here to protect? My art? Their hands were clasped behind their backs. When they turned around, I saw that behind their backs, each of them held a long, thin silver wand, with a red rubber handle and a prong of wire filament on the end of it.
I redirected my gaze back into the middle of our social circle. They were so far up above me, and I was so near to the floor in comparison. I saw everything from below. Norm was having trouble balancing a glass of wine and a pile of cheese cubes held in a napkin. He was speaking animatedly to the Important Man. With the thumb of the hand that held the cheese, Norm struggled to nudge his glasses up the bridge of his nose and then swipe back the three ribbons of hair that clung to his otherwise bald pate, but it was difficult to perform these small actions with a handful of cheese, and I watched one of the little yellow cubes of cheese tumble from his palm and onto